After having used amaroK on my laptop for ages I am now thinking that it would be great to have amaroK in my car.

I have wanted to make a car PC for sometime, and to have a vga touchscreen mounted at the front and sync with my laptop using wifi.

The amaroK GUI seems to be a great interface to my music. I\'m thinking of basically having X.org load up, and then have X.org load amaroK fullscreen, in the \"single window\" mode.

There are a few things which would need to be implemented, which I am sure I could put into an \"amaroK car plugin\" of somesort. Although I\'m not sure if the amarok plugin interface allows you to modify the gui?

A few things that I\'m sure would be needed:

- On screen keyboard, when clicking \"search\"
- Sync with remote amaroK, or simply a sync-with-remote-file-collection type thing
- A few parts of the GUI might need to be modified slightly by my plugin, in order to make things easier to use with the touchscreen.

Any ideas or suggestions from people?
Thanks
Andy

too weird. I finally register to offer some suggestions in this vein, after a coupla months of kicking around similar thoughts, and I come across this post.

I had been running cajun on an older thinkpad, and wasn\'t completely happy with it. (though functional, and not all that bad) I took a hard look at most of the options out there, and find myself happiest with amaroK\'s interface and options. have been using the aforementioned thinkpad in the car, reborn with FC 3 and amaroK, for about two months now. I just installed a second laptop with Slackware 10 and amaroK 1.2 beta 2 for yet more fun.

So, in short, I totally agree. A couple of thoughts:

1) a fullscreen GUI merging of the player and playlist would make the whole car thing sweeter. personally, some of the eye candy of the player window finding its way into the \"context\"/\"current track\" area would do me right.

2) a Playlist mode, which cycles through playlists; buttons for Next PL, Prev PL

3) Playlist functions - rank playlists (for sorting playlists when playlist mode used) assign function/shortcut keys to favorite playlists

4) wifi sync sounds cool, though mine being a laptop, I just bring it in and ftp/wget/rsync to my desktop, depending on the alignment of the planets...

5) touchscreen would be interesting, and would free up my passenger seat, given my current ghetto rigging. though music > passenger

Not *too* much more than a slightly different face and a little streamlining of certain functions needs to be done - really it works pretty well in my car as it is.

I was under the impression there was no real plugin API for amaroK quite yet... my linux programming experience is limited to php, shell scripts and hacking already written apps, unfortunately... though I have been giving some thought to trying to mess up bigger and better things...

You haven\'t heard of one because there isn\'t a plugin API for amaroK (yet). Obviously its open source so you can do whatever.

You can control a lot of stuff in DCOP.

Are you sure something like MythTV wouldn\'t make more sense for your purposes? Never used it, but it sounds like something more up their alley.

what\'s up, eean? Yeah, I had read that there wasn\'t an existing API, but that it was under consideration for the future. (think that was in a post a month back or so)

I took a brief look at DCOP in some of the documentation, but it didn\'t seem to have terribly much, and sounded as if I\'d be adding another layer to make calls to the running app, rather than making adjustments to the existing GUI or app.

I have been meaning to get around to giving mythtv or freevo/freevix a try. problem with most of the applications is that they do so much that many features are left out or become afterthoughts. not to mention the bloat that goes with installing all dependencies for junk I don\'t intend to use... I don\'t want GPS or TV, DVD or program listings in Hungarian, I just want a full featured music player with a sweet front end.

amaroK pleases me greatly for just about everything I look for in a player (without getting nitpicky or unreasonable)... rather than reinvent the wheel I thought I might change the body color/style a bit. and maybe add some fuzzy dice.

I don\'t really need MythTV, all I want to do is listen to my music. amaroK seems to be the best interface I have used for browsing a music collection.

I have seen enough **** in-car MP3 players that have terrible interfaces. Having to browse through 40 tracks to find the one you want.

Also, about 90% of my music collection is ripped to OGG, so that rules out getting an ipod/ipod car kit.

A touch screen would be the only input device I would need.

I think a 7\" to 10\" touchscreen would be fine for amaroK fullscreen, @1024x768

Well, its just that amaroK is very oriented towards drag and drap and using the right mouse button.

Yeah, that\'s right. I was thinking that would be something that I would need to alter for a touch screen. I would be taking away some functionality.

Not that all amaroK functionality would all be needed in a car.

To solve problems like drag and drop, I would have to change things slightly.